April 17, 2018

New research from an interdisciplinary collaboration among historians, political scientists, and statisticians suggests that rhetorical innovations may have played a significant role in winning acceptance for the new principles of governance that built the French republic’s foundation — and inspired future democracies around the world.

April 5, 2018

A workshop at SFI in early April explores questions about scientific value. This event brings together researchers and institutional leaders who will discuss how to measure impact and improve judgment by looking at tools of complexity.

April 2, 2018

The noise in high-dimensional datasets can obscure real correlations — and give rise to illusory patterns that don’t mean anything. April 2-5, an interdisciplinary group of mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical computer scientists meets at SFI to address the problem and devise new algorithms that can succeed all the way up to the limits that arise from not having enough data, or not knowing if the data is accurate.

April 1, 2018

A team of scientists has made a fundamental discovery about how fires on the edges of these forests control their shape and stability. Their study implies that when patches of tropical forest lose their natural shape it could contribute to the sudden, even catastrophic, transformation of that land from trees to grass.

March 26, 2018

Collective movement is one of the great natural wonders on Earth and has long captured our imaginations. But there’s a lot we don’t understand about how collective movement drives — and is driven by — broader ecological and evolutionary processes.

March 26, 2018

In a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, SFI Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl, long-time collaborator Colin Torney (University of Glasgow), and co-authors, used drones to collect overhead footage of migrating caribou. This is the first paper to use drones to record the movement of individual animals within groups. It is also among the first to study social interactions within those groups as they migrate.

March 12, 2018

Patents are one of the best sources of data on technology development — an open-ended, historical and adaptive system that shows us how and why inventions have come to be. But is the U.S. patent system broken?

February 26, 2018

Most election polls take the political pulse of a state or nation by reaching out to citizens about their voting plans. SFI Professor Mirta Galesic says pollsters might also ask: how do your friends plan to vote?

February 20, 2018

What would happen if neural networks were explicitly trained to discard useless information, and how to tell them to do so, is the subject of recent research by SFI's Artemy Kolchinsky, Brendan Tracey, and David Wolpert.

February 7, 2018

SFI External Professor Jon Machta and colleagues from the University of California, Davis, show that one of the most famous models in statistical physics, the Ising model, could be used to understand why pistachio trees bloom in synchrony.